


burn out the light

by gemstonecircles



Series: Lions and Lambs [2]
Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Angst, Blood and Violence, Eventual Slice of Life, F/M, Fireflies are happy right?, OFC - Freeform, best case alternate proposal?, no beta we die like men, tw fires, tw insect death, tw insect dissection, worst case marriage proposal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:14:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29802762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gemstonecircles/pseuds/gemstonecircles
Summary: Prompt # 23 for 1xR Love Relections Wing-O March Madness.This will definitely have two parts.At least.
Relationships: Relena Peacecraft/Heero Yuy
Series: Lions and Lambs [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2189268
Comments: 26
Kudos: 30
Collections: Love Reflection March Madness (2021)





	1. fireflies

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt # 23 for 1xR Love Relections Wing-O March Madness.
> 
> This will definitely have two parts.  
> At least.

Once, when she was a child on holiday with her family, white tights stained green and torn with laughing tumbles to the earth and pink dress dirtied with grubby hands and the freedom to frolic, she caught fireflies in a jar. 

As the twilight had gathered its dark skirts around the rental bungalow and the stars and satellites began shining across the sky, she had gasped in awe at the winking yellow lights around the yard.

“Are they fairies?” She’d asked her father, breathless.

“No, Relena,” he’d laughed, and scooped his hand through the air and then showed her the small insect that was gently cupped in his palm. The small creature lit up his fingers like a lantern, and then tranquilly flew away, blinking brightly as it flew.

She had run into the kitchen to find a clear glass jar and spent hours carefully catching and depositing the small insects inside. They shone together like tiny comets. 

“I’m going to keep them forever and ever!” she announced happily.

Her parents shared worried looks, but acquiesced.

She fell asleep watching the small lights fly and shine, a tiny universe entirely her own.

But in the morning, all the fireflies were dead, small dark bodies plain and light-less at the bottom of the jar. 

“Honey,” her father said gently, as she wept and clung to the jar, “some things just can’t live when they are trapped. 

* * *

  
He had found a firefly once, clinging to a leaf after a storm, and gathered it into his already cracked and calloused child’s palm. The small body was blinking weakly, even as it struggled to crawl away from his small, dirty fingers. The pale light reminded him of lightning, of the electricity, and he was struck with a desperate desire to understand what made it shine. When the insect finally expired, and he used an oil- stained box cutter to gently pierce its abdomen, all that he found inside was viscera. No light, no fire, only the banal remains of a small, unremarkable fly, to be swept away with the others into the street.

He had felt shame, and frustration. How could something so small and fragile contain such delicate, unknowable secrets? He had swallowed the fascination with the small creature down, and, as always, carried on.

He accepted, when his sleep was troubled and he thought back to the fragile, brittle body that had for such a short time held such power, that perhaps some things were unexplainable and uncontrollable. 

* * *

  
He hadn’t expected her to cry, and he hadn’t expected her to say no. 

She had turned away from him to place one delicate palm against the window and try to muffle her sobs with the other.

He felt like the ground had vanished, that he was floating through space, confused and blinded. 

“I thought that this was what you wanted.” He managed finally. “It’s what people do, don’t they. Marry the person they love.”

She turned to smile sadly and tenderly at him, tears still rolling down her cheeks. She reached out her hand to grasp his tightly. He was surprised, as he always was, at the strength in her grip. 

“It is what is recommended in the manual, I suppose,” she smiled at him, “fall in love, get married, have children.” There were small lines at the corners of her eyes that hadn’t been there when she was a girl, and he wanted to trace each one with the tip of this finger, to map the tiny, precious changes in her face. 

“It may be the normal thing to do,” she continued, “but it’s not the _right_ thing to do. Not for us.” 

“Do you _not_ want to marry me?” He asked, suddenly shaken that he had misjudged the situation so badly.

She laughed weakly, “Heero, I have wanted to marry you since I was 15 years old. Before I even knew what that meant. But the last decade has been hard. And in these last few years it’s been hard enough on you being my lover, with _some_ semblance of privacy in your life. But entering fully into the spotlight, being with me, as my _husband_ , as a public figure? It would kill you. It would hollow you out and leave you empty. You wouldn’t be able to shine.” 

“I think I could manage.”

She turned away from him again and suddenly pounded her fist against the table beside her.

“I don't want you to _manage_ ,” she cried out, as he took a step back at the uncharacteristic despair in her voice. “I want you to _fly_ . I would rather _die_ than keep you trapped in a jar and watch all your fire burn out.” 

* * *

Even as he had let himself melt into civilian life, finding the comfort of the peaceful mundane, he kept up part-time work as a contractor for the Preventers. He was called in intermittently to help “The Po and Chang Crew” with various technical issues and system coding upgrades. The periodically spaced calls for his help, as well as the necessity for Preventers to keep his medical records on file, made him suspect that Sally was, in her sneaky but maternal way, making sure that he was healthy and safe. He was never called in on missions, or on security, and he was torn between gratitude and frustration. A mission would give him a release for the building violence deep in his stomach, and security detail might mean that he would be able to be close to her again, to stand in the electric current of her presence, however briefly. 

When he watched her on the news he thought that however much she had tried to spare him, she had not spared herself. The years had added care, and tension. The lovely, apple- cheeked girl had slowly changed into a beautiful, sad woman, one with too much melancholy in her eyes, and too much tension between her brows. The two decades of public service had worn on her, and she was beginning to look a bit thin. Heero even overheard Sally remark, “that girl needs to stop and eat a cheeseburger.”

“That’s the problem,” her partner had groused, as he lounged in the door of their office while Heero debugged their latest software system, “she never _stops_.”

He thought of a firefly on a rain soaked leaf, struggling to keep going even as it’s light flickered out.


	2. finding hurts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt # 9 Hurt/Comfort
> 
> I wrote this so fast, and also on my phone. So I blame the technology? 
> 
> There’s a lot of hurting, some comfort.

When they finally did call him in for a mission, it was bad. Kidnapping Relena had become something of a political joke, due to the frequency with which it occurred. The majority of abductions were, however, desperate pleas for understanding from groups who thought the Foreign Minister might be the one person who would listen, who would negotiate, who would understand, and, just as often, she would. 

This time was different and the tension burning among both Preventers and contractors had his stomach clenching as soon as he entered the building. Relena was on leave pending re-election, and had been taken from her late mother’s home by a group who were anything but sympathetic. 

He knew Sally and Wufei were at the main site, miles away, preparing to extract her, but something in his gut made him look more closely at the munitions stockpile that he had been tasked with observing. There were too many guards, he thought, too many nervous guards, and far too much movement. He had just heard Wufei growl over the comm- link, “Where _is_ she,” when he smelled the acrid scent of petrol and all of the guards moving swiftly away from the abandoned warehouse. 

“There’s some movement here,” he murmured into his comm, “I need to check it out.”

“Just be careful, Yuy,” came Sally’s voice, and he switched his comm-link to silent just as he reached the abandoned entrance and the entire building was rocked by the first explosion.

* * *

  
When he lifted his head, he smelled the sticky, tarry smoke from burning petrol. His belt, comm-link, and locator pin had all been torn away in the blast, as, he found, had half his shirt and part of his back pocket. He touched his face, his chest, his stomach, and felt his hands slick with blood and oil. He was injured, maybe seriously, and knew that he should withdraw, light a flare and wait for Sally and the others. 

But without reason or rationale he also knew that Relena was inside, with the same certainty that he had known that her eyes had found his across a stateroom, a street, across space itself. He thought of the firefly slowly blinking out while he had watched - _he had watched_ \- without brushing the raindrops from its tired wings. 

He knew from the core of his soul that Relena was in this compound and, if he had read the first explosion correctly, they had very little time. 

The compound was concrete, crumbling, filthy, filled with boxes of contraband munitions and smoke. There was a fire crawling slowly from one end of the buildings, so he fell forward towards the columns of rebar and crumbling lime and stumbled down the first staircase he could find.

The complex was… _complex_ , and every empty room and corridor left him more desperate and panicked. The smoke was pouring in faster now, and he felt his feet begin to stumble.

When he finally found her, huddled in the corner of an empty storeroom, she was coughing from the smoke and furiously, desperately trying to free her chained hand from a thick, rusted pipe. Her eyes, when they met his, held the wild horror of a trapped animal. She was still in the black slacks and light sweater she had vanished in. She had a growing bruise on one cheek, her pale skin highlighting her red, swollen eyes. Her lips were pale, chapped and cracked, slightly opened in a silent entreaty for help. He had never wanted to kiss her more. 

* * *

He managed, between gasping breaths, to yank the chain loose and pull her battered wrist free. She clumsily pulled her sweater over her head and handed one end to him, covering her own mouth with the other. With her hand on his bleeding chest and the cotton sweater pressed hard against their faces, they clutched at each other, lurched together towards the doorway, just as the fireball engulfed the room.

* * *

Half of her long hair was singed off to the shoulder, and there were blisters gathering at her fingers. Her once designer clothes were now grey rags and one of her shoes had a heel snapped off. Even with her singed hair and dirty face and eyes pink and swollen from the smoke, he thought he would never see anyone so beautiful, and felt that familiar electric tug as he slowly reached out a hand. 

“You look terrible” he managed, and she laughed, coughed roughly from deep in her chest, and reached out to place her palm against his face. 

“You look pretty bad yourself,” she managed, her eyes crinkling, “were you in an explosion or something?”

He tried to laugh in answer, but found his throat to coated in soot, and answered with a harsh, rasping noise. 

“Are you alright?” She asked, concern overwhelming the euphoria of survival, reaching out to touch the oozing blood on his forehead, place one hand firmly against the long, shallow gash across his chest and stomach.

“Nothing rest won’t heal. You?”

“The same,” she replied, turning back to watch the burning compound, her blistered and bloody hand cupped lightly in his, palm to palm, fingertip to fingertip. “A lot of rest.”

* * *

“You know,” he murmured tentatively, “I lost my comm- link before I found you. Before we got out.”

She looked at him curiously.

He cleared his throat, “Objectively, if we hadn’t gotten out, our bodies would never be found.”

She grinned suddenly, the old, girlish grin that he loved.

“I can’t tell if you are mourning our fiery, romantic doom, or suggesting that we use this opportunity to vanish.”

He shrugged, “This is simply an ideal situation for faking one's own death.”

She held onto his hand tighter, even though he knew it was hurting her.

“Heero Yuy, are you asking me to die with you?”

He coughed, tried to clear his grimy throat, and then turned to look her squarely in the eye.

“Yes.” 

She regarded him intensely, her blurry eyes shocked but considering, and he watched her mind working furiously, taking in the changes, the heavy weight of time, their conversation years ago. 

“Okay,” she whispered, finally, holding his gaze. “Okay, yes. Yes. Yes, please. If you’ll still have me.”

He brought her bruised and blistered hand up to his lips, and then carefully folded her against his side. 

“We’ll have to be out of here soon.”

“I think we have a few moments to watch our funeral pyre,” she replied, sagging against him, exhausted, “And after all, what could be more appropriate than to die and be reborn?”

They sat together, in the dirt of the forest, watching the last pillars of the compound break and fall, the crackling ashes and embers floating in the night air. From where they sat, folded together on the hillside, the burning embers glowed in darkness like fireflies. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just to be clear the are going to _fake their own deaths_ not actually die. This is not that dark of a story.


	3. embers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt #4. “That is my least vulnerable spot” - Casablanca (1942)
> 
> “What if he’s holding her hostage,” Keiko whispered dramatically. 
> 
> “Maybe,” Rumiko quipped back, “they’re ghosts.”

There was something thrilling about any new neighbors in their town, and even though Rumiko prided herself on not taking part in local gossip, on this occasion she couldn’t help but both listen in and weave theories of her own.

The new residents were quiet, and so deeply private that gossip was bound to flourish. Her high school friend Keiko, stopping in Rumiko’s shokudo for tea and curry, as well as a long visit, had a number of theories. The small tickle of tourists wouldn’t begin for months, so Rumiko didn’t mind Keiko lingering over her tea and spouting strange theories, each more incredible than the next.

“What if he’s holding her hostage,” Keiko whispered dramatically. 

“Maybe,” Rumiko quipped back, “they’re ghosts.” Keiko rolled her eyes.

“Think about it though! He’s the one who comes in to town for supplies, and I’ve never seen her whole face, with the way her hair is always covering one side.”

“She could just be covering scars,” Rumiko countered, quellingly, “she has those burn marks on her arm, maybe she is just embarrassed.”

“Speaking of scars,” Keiko began, leaning forward in the excitement of sharing New Information, “Toshi said that that Hiroki guy helped him when his truck broke down and he had to replace the radiator? He took off his shirt and apparently he looks like he went through a threshing machine. Apparently he’s just scarred to pieces.” 

“They were probably in the war,” Rumiko said, trying to change the subject, “so we shouldn’t judge them for being a bit jumpy. I’m just sorry I missed any shirtless mechanics. Toshi should have called us!”

Keiko laughed and started in on a story about Toshi and _his_ new girl, but Rumiko couldn’t help but privately maintain her curiosity. 

There was something deeply compelling about the two of them, closed away in a small, older house on the edge of town. On her way to work in the misty mornings Rumiko passed it by, and often saw the woman out in the garden, fixing trellises of flowers or transplanting vegetables. Once, in the early dawn, hidden by the trees at the edge of the footpath, she saw the man working on the porch, patching up a sagging board with hammer and nails. The woman came out in bare feet and a short nightgown, carrying two cups of coffee, and Rumiko watched as she placed the cups on the porch, and exchanged a few soft words with the man before launching herself at him, tackling him into the tall grass covering the grounds in a flurry of limbs and hot, heavy kisses and soft moans. Rumiko blushed and averted her eyes as she hurried along the path to work. She was _pretty sure_ the woman wasn’t a hostage. 

* * *

Slowly, the two came into the town more and more often, sometimes even stopping at Rumiko’s restaurant for tea and a small meal. 

They were still young, hovering around thirty, but there was something older in the manner of their interactions, something tired, and yet, relieved. 

The woman was quietly polite, with a soft brunette bob that hung at a dramatic side part, heavily obscuring her face, but the glimpses Rumiko got of were of kind blue eyes and a gentle smile. The man seemed hard, intense, with close-cropped hair and a ragged scar across his forehead. However, he always quietly inquired after Rumiko’s aging mother, and his hands, as he reached to help the woman from her seat or gently touch her back to guide her across streets and through doorways, were indescribably tender, as if he were handling something fragile and precious. It was, Rumiko sighed, deeply romantic. 

That they were Colonists was universally accepted; the man’s Standard was accentless and monotone, but his Japanese had a distinct L1 accent, with the gliding diphthong of his ”い”s and his “r” uvular rather than alveolar, giving his speech the harsher, more angular cadence of the Colonies.

The woman spoke less often, and never in Standard, but her Japanese was hesitant and less accented, book-learned, and Rumiko wondered if she was from another colony, perhaps L4. 

As the seasons came and went, the town accepted that the wars had left some wounded children in its wake, and moved on to other scandals. The revelation that Toshi had been seen flirting with _another_ girl a few towns over, led to shocked betrayal and a churning gossip mill among the entirety of both towns. 

Therefore, when the woman began to appear in town in long, soft dresses with empire waists that slowly highlighted her growing belly, the responses were of quiet delight, not conspiracy. 

“Did you see that sweet couple down at the edge of town are expecting?” Mrs. Takamura mentioned in between complaints about her grandchildren and her latest doctor's appointment.  
“It’s so wonderful, I’m glad to see some more young families in this town. And that sweet girl looks just radiantly happy.”

“She’s hardly a _girl_ ,” Rumiko had countered, but Mrs. Takamura had whacked her ankle gently with her cane, laughing.“You’re all children to me.” 

* * *

Rumiko was unused to seeing the woman in town alone, and so was a bit shocked to see her enter the restaurant unaccompanied, and even more alarmed to see that her face was pale and clammy.

“Oh my gosh, are you okay?” Rumiko gushed, rushing over to help her to a seat. The woman huffed out a laugh, but allowed herself to be assisted.

“Thank you so much, I just felt a little faint! I hope you don’t mind if I sit for a cup of tea, and water, if it’s not a burden?”

“Of course!” Rumiko replied, and hurried to the kitchen. When she came back with the tray, she saw the woman gently rubbing her heavily swollen belly, smiling softly and humming a strange, haunting tune that Rumiko couldn’t place. 

When Rumiko approached, she looked up and smiled, her face uncovered for the first time. Rumiko was shocked, though she didn’t know why, to find her so beautiful. 

“Thank you so much, Rumiko,” the woman smiled, “Hiro...ki and I always love stopping in here. Your family has a beautiful place.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” murmured Rumiko, then overcome with boldness asked, “I hope you don’t mind, but most of us who live here were born here. It’s really rare that people move in. Not,” she hurried to amend, “that it’s a problem! But why did you decide to move to Aogaki?”

The woman smiled at her, warm and light. “No need for ‘ma’am’, please just call me Lina,” she sipped at her tea and gazed fondly out of the window at the small town.

“We moved here,” she said, finally, “because we heard that you have the most beautiful fireflies.” 

* * *

_Coda_ : 

“You do know there was someone on the path,” Heero told her, even as he let her pull him further down into the shelter of the long grass and melted under the frantic heat of her hands and mouth, “they definitely, oh _God_ , Relena, stop, they definitely saw us.”

Relena paused to lever herself up onto her arms, to hover over him, her now-brown bob hanging around her face. “That’s what’s so wonderful,” she murmured, looking entirely too satisfied, “we don’t have to care anymore. There aren’t any vulnerable spots left.”

“I’m not sure,” he countered, “I wouldn’t call you my _least_ vulnerable spot.” He reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear, a moment of seriousness, of remembrance, before he pulled her back down to the ground, and she laughed in delight. 

  
  



End file.
